While there is interest in pathways-aligned high school math reform among secondary education stakeholders, change in high school math depends a great deal on policies, practices, and norms at the higher education level. This report focuses on the role of higher education in influencing (encouraging or deterring) secondary education math reform.…

This Policy Brief captures some of the challenges for students' math education trajectories, in light of the coronavirus pandemic, and it highlights three ways states can strengthen math pathways to improve student access and success. Specific policy options that states can consider include: (1) aligning high school math courses with postsecondary…

The Center for Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) conducted a multiyear, multimethod effort to learn how school districts, charter schools, and regional partners can support the successful implementation, expansion, and sustainability of personalized learning (PL) in schools. The vision for PL is to tailor instruction to individual students'…

As many as one in three businesses in the United States struggled to fill needed jobs in 2015. Millions of Americans, including at least 5.5 million youth, are disconnected from employment. Governors have a tremendous opportunity through the implementation of the federal Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA) to reset their state…

This report examines how technology and automation are changing the job market -- and what states can do to prepare adults for the new workplace. It analyzes shifts from low- to middle-skills jobs, details current education levels, and offers recommendations for retooling adult education programs.

Third grade is a critical checkpoint in a child's educational journey. By the end of third grade, children need literacy skills that prepare them for increasing curriculum demands in fourth grade and beyond. Students who are not reading on grade level by this point are significantly more likely to drop out of high school or fail to graduate on…

Southern Regional Education Board's (SREB's) Commission on Career and Technical Education challenges states to build bridges from high school to postsecondary attainment and career advancement by developing rigorous, relevant career pathways that align secondary, postsecondary, and workplace learning and lead to high-skill, high-wage jobs in…

In December 2015, President Barack Obama signed the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), which replaced No Child Left Behind (NCLB), as the nation's major law governing public schools. ESSA retains the requirement that states test all students in reading and math in grades three through eight and once in high school, as well as the requirement that…

At open-access two-year public colleges, the goal of the traditional assessment and placement process is to match incoming students to the developmental or college-level courses for which they have adequate preparation; the process presumably increases underprepared students' chances of short- and long-term success in college while maintaining the…

Educational Policy Improvement Center (EPIC) researchers visited 38 public high schools around the United States in 2007 and 2008 with the goal of validating and operationalizing a definition of college readiness. Schools in the sample were selected because they were demonstrating success at enabling more students from underrepresented groups to…

SREB states were among the first in the nation to implement statewide high school exams. Today, these exams are a key component of each state's accountability system. This report identifies which states use comprehensive exams and which use end-of-course exams, how students perform on them, and whether achievement gaps have narrowed. It also…

This is an abridged, summary report of selected findings from "Pieces of the Puzzle: Factors in the Improvement of Urban School Districts on the National Assessment of Educational Progress"--a comprehensive study prepared by the Council of the Great City Schools in collaboration with the American Institutes for Research (AIR) and with…

This report summarizes preliminary and exploratory research conducted by the Council of the Great City Schools and the American Institutes for Research on urban school systems participating in the Trial Urban District Assessment (TUDA) of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). The study is one of the first large-scale analyses…

Volume II contains six appendices to Volume I, including short summaries of the 18 schools that were studied. Appendices included in this report are: (1) Evaluation Methodology; (2) Promising Reform Strategies; (3) Descriptions of the Research-Based Methods or Strategies Being Used; (4) Short Summaries of 18 Comprehensive School Reform…

Comprehensive school reform calls for a "whole-school" and coordinated approach to improve schools. The strategy differs from piecemeal and fragmented efforts that also in the past have seemed only to lead to short-lived changes. To stimulate whole-school reform across the country, Congress appropriated funds in FY1998 for the U.S.…